February 16, 2011

If you own a company, manage a business, run a department or contribute to a team, you are frightfully aware of the time constraints that face you every day. You have deadlines and meetings, emails and projects as well as constant reminders of the bottom line. And what should you do about all this online stuff?

There are close to two billion of us online reading, digesting, publishing, sharing, tweeting and conversing. The amount of content published in a day is unrelenting and new spaces are being built constantly.

Our Insatiable Appetite

The choices can overwhelm you, the so-called experts can hound you and the decision remains how to improve the organization. And unless your company is called “campaign”, you need a strategy and long term solutions.

It’s not difficult to find someone who will lay claim to their vast knowledge of all things digital through blog webinars, Facebook symposiums and how-to LinkedIn seminars. Black hat or white hat, the recent JC Penny story blew a hole through the SEO world. Yet with a click of your mouse, you will be falling over self-proclaimed experts who can give you link bait and search juice for a handsome fee.

Under The Hood

Perhaps the not so sexy but valuable aspect of the social web that few talk about is research. Over and above any activity you partake through the myriad digital spaces, you can unearth rich useful information about your company, what people are saying about you, topics that are important to you and what your competitors are doing through regular digital audits.

With over 600 million daily search inquires on Twitter, someone seems to be digging around for information. And over a third of us online have presence on Facebook where we share more than 30 billion pieces of content every month.

And There's More

YouTube is the second largest search engine, next to parent company Google and fifth most visited website on the planet. It served more than 75 billion video streams to over 375 million unique visitors last year. And if you're looking for even more research, you can check out SlideShare which features hundreds of presentations in your industry. And there are hundreds of other spaces available.

The information out there can be gathered, analyzed and implemented. And constant research of the social web can positively effect the bottom line.